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— Alfie Purl, a sheep who lives in England's Cotswolds, is not the head-butting type. So when he went nuts and started bumping his owner—an archeologist named Emma Turner—in the chest one day, Turner "thought there must be something wrong with him."

As it turned out, however, something was wrong with her. A few days after Alfie's freak-out, Turner's chest developed a bruise—and the bruise developed a lump. Turner went to the doctor—because British people can do such things, at least for the moment—and learned she had breast cancer. Alfie had somehow "sensed" that cancer was inside her—or so the hospital staffers who cared for Turner believed: "The doctors and nurses said that if Alfie hadn't done what he did, when he did it, I wouldn't have found the lump for a few years, by which time it would have spread.

Sensing Sickness....Cancer-sniffing dogs have shown promise at detecting the disease in its early stages
snip
One of the touted leaders of the cancer-detection pack was a standard poodle named Shing Ling-hua, who worked as a therapy dog at the Pine Street Chinese Benevolent Association in San Anselmo and had been trained to try to detect cancer by smelling tubes containing breath samples of people with early- stage breast or lung cancer.

Spirited, happy and self-possessed, Shing Ling was said to be 90 percent successful in detecting tumors, according to the association's directors. She died earlier this year, leaving a void at the clinic and cutting short an apparently auspicious cancer-sniffing career.http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...01/CM38469.DTL